Don Quixote made of car parts, outside Tony's Auto Repair
near Cesar Chavez Trolley Station,
25th & Commercial, San Diego
(photo by author)
~ or ~
by Alan B. Scrivener, Vice-Chair
San Diego Professional Chapter ACM SIGGRAPH
21 August 2007
As I lay upon my bed in total exhaustion on the night of Thursday, August 9, 2007, at about six PM, at the end of my SIGGRAPH week, my mind mulled over the week's events, and two quotations came to mind, representing two competing but not totally opposed aspects of the SIGGRAPH conference; one from a "cyberpunk" science fiction author who writes of antisocial outsiders:
"The street tries to find its own uses for things."
— William Gibson
The other from a legendary community organizer:
"We cannot seek achievement for ourselves and forget about progress and prosperity for our community."
— Cesar Chavez
The street is where the loner goes, to find what he or she is looking for and then to flee. The square is where the people assemble, to form connections and to build something together. In the SIGGRAPH conference I find aspects of both.
I realized many SIGGRAPHs ago that each person experiences the conference differently, partially a function of their goals. I myself am a long-time insider of the chapters organization, and attended my first SIGGRAPH conference in 1983, and so I was worried that I might turn a jaded eye to this, my first SIGGRAPH conference since 2003. Therefore I decided to try to capture the conference from the point of view of my 13-year-old daughter as well. (Not that she isn't a SIGGRAPH veteran, having attended her first in utero, her second at age 9 months, and her first which she remembers at age 6.)
My goals in attending the conference were:
Charlotte's goals, as far as I could discern, were:
Our plan was as follows:
|
Friday 3 August |
Saturday 4 August |
Sunday 5 August |
Wednesday 8 August |
Thursday 9 August |
|
A.S. attend Chapters Dinner at Dussini 7:30 - 9:30 PM |
A.S. attend first 2 hours of Chapters Workshop 8:00 - 10:00 AM |
A.S. attend Media Pass Meeting 9:00 - 10:00 AM
A.S. return with |
A.S. attend Papers and Exhibition in the afternoon, followed by Chapters Booth 2:00 - 4:00 PM |
A.S. and daughter last day at SIGGRAPH 3:30 PM closing |
What do you call it, a busman's holiday (to go motoring) or a mailman's holiday (to go hiking)? For me it's taking vacation time to attend and volunteer at a trade show and conference. At least I know what I like.
Here, then, is a run-down of the sequence of events and "check-off items" that formed my SIGGRAPH experience:
Two Saturdays before SIGGRAPH we had a "Chapter Tiki Party, Comic-Con Planning Session and SIGGRAPH 2007 Conference Preview" at which we enjoyed a Tiki ambiance, planned our table at Comic-Con (explained below), and watched the SIGGRAPH 2007 preview DVD. ( san-diego.siggraph.org/events/Preview2007/Preview2007.html )
For the fifth year in a row the San Diego Chapter fielded a table at the San Diego Comic-Con, a huge international convention of comic books and pop culture, where they are kind enough to give us a free table. ( www.comic-con.org ) We were able to promote both the upcoming international SIGGRAPH conference and our local chapter. Booth volunteers were Mike Pique, Yvonne Hsu, and Alan, Dixie and Charlotte Scrivener.
This year we finally got a system in place to track how effective this outreach is. This required that we:
We'll know on Sep. 19th how well this plan worked.
As always Comic-Con was a great way to prep for SIGGRAPH, since it is held in the same Convention Center. Since it is about twice as big, we get the worst case scenarios for parking, food service, etc.
On the Friday before SIGGRAPH, Mike Pique and I visited Dussini Mediterranean Bistro, in San Diego's Gaslamp Quarter, to attended the traditional dinner where local chapter leaders from around the world meet and greet prior to the conference.
A Padres baseball game in progress a block away made the evening seem more exciting and urban, but also made parking more challenging.
On Saturday 4 August the Chapters Leadership Workshop was held at the Marriott Hotel next to the Convention Center. This is a wonderful opportunity for the worldwide leadership of local SIGGRAPH chapters to network, share knowledge and organize coordinated activities, such as traveling art shows and speaker tours.
Mike Pique and Yvonne Hsu of the San Diego chapter were able to attend the workshop all day, but I could only be there for two hours in the morning, so I used my short-term parking hack #23 and parked at nearby Seaport Village shopping center and walked to the meeting on the sea wall path by San Diego Bay. Upon my return I bought an espresso at Upstart Crow ( www.upstartcrowtrading.com/contact.cfm ) and they validated my parking. There I also picked up a free newspaper, San Diego Downtown News, which had the headline:
"SIGGRAPH unveils latest in all that is high tech"
and an article that included this paragraph:
"One complaint that SIGGRAPH conference organizers often hear is
that there is simply too much information for one person to absorb..."
I got my badge at the Media Pass Meeting on Sunday morning, and then returned Sunday afternoon with my wife and daughter by car. I dropped them off at Registration and went to park in the east parking structure, after arranging to meet them at the iVie Awards viewing area near the Sail Pavilion.
I chose this location to rendezvous because I'd noticed earlier that it was open to the public (outside the badge-controlled areas), had videos showing and had bean bag chairs.
These awards are given annually by the San Diego County Office of Education (SDCOE) to students in grade K-12 who've made innovative videos. ( www.ivieawards.org )
After getting together, all badged, we moved into the Sail Pavilion under the canvas sails on top of the convention Center, which had been turned into the SIGGRAPH Village. Here were the booths for next year's conference in Los Angeles (I always make sure to get a pin and a poster), the new SIGGRAPH Asia conference, the "SIGGRAPH encore" DVD of conference session videos, the Membership booth, the Chapters booth, various international booths and the International Center. The technical posters, a gaming area, and food service also shared this large space.
We got a cell phone call from some friends — another Dad and Daughter I'll call R & B — who were having badging problems.
(It seems like this happens every SIGGRAPH. This year a high school friend of mine worked for Action Figures, the staffing agency that provided the temporary employees to work registration. She told me that they were prohibited from attending any portion of the SIGGRAPH events on pain of immediate firing. I thought, "No wonder many of them don't care if other people can't get in.")
While waiting for them to arrive I picked up the Books section of the San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper, and read some of the best news I'd gotten all year: one of my favorite science fiction authors, William Gibson, was publishing a new novel, Spook Country. ( books.signonsandiego.com/?q=node/2283 ) The reviewer gushed:
"Spook Country" is a thriller discernible only by its thin vapor trails;
determining the precise paths followed by its various threads is probably
impossible and most assuredly beside the point. What Gibson has in fact
zeroed in on — in four dimensions and counting — is this instant in
our species' geometrically accelerating history, a chilly flashpoint
intersection of mind, body, place, time and (say it) cyberspace.
Quite a boon, that this novel, this high-speed, high-res ethnography,
has appeared here and now.
This got me thinking about Mr. Gibson's view of tech, and his incisive analysis:
"The street tries to find its own uses for things."
One thing I found my own uses for was the Media Lounge. My chapters-granted Media Pass (which I am now earning by finishing this article) entitled me to the use of this small room upstairs at the Convention Center. It was never crowded. On Sunday there were sodas and cookies and coffee and M&Ms. The Macadamia nut & white chocolate cookies were divine. I used it as a refuge, a place to sit and plan, and a place to just chill.
It was also a place to pick up information: media CDs and press releases mostly. I found out that the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CalITIT), on the campus of UCSD, or "CalIT-squared" as everyone calls it, was having some events at their facility as part of SIGGRAPH. (I knew I'd never make it up to La Jolla to see them.)
( www.calit2.net )
And I learned that SGI, though they didn't have a booth, had sold some servers to Vanguard to use to make Space Chimps. ( www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2007/august/vanguard.html ) "Well," I thought, "at least they have one customer." (To be fair, I'm sure SGI has other customers; but I find it hard to imagine anyone in the press writing an article without the "I thought you were dead!" slant, since they just came out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy last October.)
When we finally met up with our friends R & B we proceeded into the maelstrom that was the Art Show and Emerging Technologies.
Almost the first thing we wandered into was a room full of illuminated globes. Later I figured out it was:
We were in there for a while before I got the whole point (more on that later) and finally we moved on. The daughters, C and B, quickly found an installation called Diorama Table.
As I watched I realized I recognized the "hand of the artist" in this work. It was by Keiko Takahashi of Japan Electronics College, who had two works in the San Diego SIGKIDS event in 2003. (To be fair she had emailed me and said to look for her installation.) I looked around and quickly found her standing by. She was kind enough to answer some of my questions about the technology. More on this later.
We saw many other wondrous things in the maelstrom. Some I will mention later, others are lost in the blur. At one point I came upon a confessional booth with a computer interface instead of a priest. It was:
I knelt and began to click and type. How long since my last confession? Never. (I am not Catholic.) What is my sin? I looked at the list; they all seemed so boring. I clicked "Adultery," that sounded sexy. My 13-year-old daughter walked up behind me. "What's adultery?" she asked. "Uh," I said. my wife stepped in and whispered an answer.
Exhausted, we called it a day even though there was much more to see. I ended up napping on a couch in the SIGGRAPH Village.
My parents brought me with them to San Diego when I was 5 years old, so I am a "nearly native." During the 1980s I heard one of my friends tell another, "You might as well tear out all the pages in your Thomas Brothers [map book] that are south of Interstate-8." By this he meant that the tech-driven rising middle class in San Diego was moving northward, towards North County, and away from the traditionally black and Hispanic neighborhoods in southeastern San Diego.
While riding the trolley to Comic-Con, trying out routes, I had been reading a book: Nothing Like It In the World — The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 (2001) by Stephen E. Ambrose. (ISBN: 0743203178) One thing I learned from it was the origin of the phrase "the wrong side of the tracks," which comes from the direction smoke would blow in the prevailing winds. Nobody wanted soot landing on their clothesline, so the downwind side of the tracks ended up with lower real estate values.
I thought of that old expression as I pondered the choice of which trolley line to take from Santee, the eastern suburb we live in, to the Convention Center. My two choices were:
I decided to put aside my concerns about security (or maybe it was my prejudices) and take the southern route.
At one station I looked out the window and saw a quote from Cesar E. Chavez:
"We cannot seek achievement for ourselves and forget about
progress and prosperity for our community."
I thought that might apply to the 3D graphics community. I looked at the route map ( www.sdcommute.com/Rider_Information/trolley/trolleymap.asp ) and determined I was one stop from getting off, at the 25th & Commercial station, making a mental note to come back and take a picture.
On Wednesday I made my first foray into the exhibits, with no exact plan except to walk up and down the aisles. (Later I went through the exhibitors list noting which were in San Diego or south Orange county and went back on Thursday for specific contacts for possible chapter meetings.) One of the first things I noticed was how many of the major studios had big booths and were recruiting animators. There were:
( esub.siggraph.org/cgi-bin/cgi/idEAll.html )
I was also amazed how many schools were present recruiting students to become animators. Not counting textbook publishers, on-line schools and magazines, there were 19 booths from schools selling 3D graphics education:
( esub.siggraph.org/cgi-bin/cgi/idECatResults.html&CategoryID=89 )
There were a lot of companies demonstrating motion capture, and along with that I noticed the return of the "booth babe." At the first SIGGRAPH I went to in Detroit in 1983, where I worked a booth, my company (GTI) had hired two Chicago models to work both NCGA and SIGGRAPH that year. By SIGGRAPH 1992 in Chicago the "babes" seemed to have disappeared, due perhaps to a more enlightened political climate, or maybe just more women among buyers. But now, with the necessity of bodies for motion capture demos, the models have returned wearing black cloth suits shaped like wet-suits and covered in fluorescent orange balls.
Meanwhile, hands-down the best give-away was the blinking starred polyhedron on a necklace from Wolfram Research (makers of the Mathematica software). ( www.wolfram.com )
The only paper presentation I had time to attend was in the session called:
Wednesday, 8 August
1:45 - 3:30 PM
Session Chair/Discussant: Marc Levoy, Stanford University
( www.siggraph.org/s2007/main.php?f=attendees&p=papers&s=17 )
The paper was:
Francesc Moreno-Noguer
CVLAB, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne
Peter N. Belhumeur
Shree K. Nayar
Columbia University
After attending to the presentation, my mind was so "blown" that I had to go outside on the balcony and stare at the sky for a while.
As party of my duty and requirements for earning a Media Pass I had to work four hours at the Chapters Booth. I have found that I enjoy this volunteer activity. I get to meet people and spend time with chapters leaders and student volunteers from all over the world, I get to meet the people who come to the booth seeking information, and I get to help them. This year I spent a bit of time talking with a student from Brazil. We found there was a high level of interest in starting new chapters in the U.S and around the world; we wished we had a hand-out on the topic.
At the close of my shift at 6 PM I was once again exhausted, so I gave away me Electronic Theater ticket (I'll see the DVD later) trolleyed home and to bed.
On Thursday, the last day of SIGGRAPH, I drove Charlotte to KFC where we got food to take with us, and then to the Grossmont Trolley Stop. As we ate some fried chicken in our car, Charlotte said, "You know, going to SIGGRAPH is a lot like camping. You need to pack your own stuff. If you have a booth it's like pitching a tent. And then you have to guard it." I told her she had a point.
We packed up the rest of the chicken to take with us for later, and then Charlotte and I rode the Orange Line directly downtown, and got off at 12th & Imperial stop, within sight of the Convention Center. But there were railroad tracks in the way, and we had to hike about a quarter of a mile to get around them. The fences looked short enough to hop, but a sign said:
|
ATTENTION
REMOTE CONTROL LOCOMOTIVES
LOCOMOTIVE CABS |
Charlotte explained that meant nobody would be there to blow the horn before we were run over. So we went around.
After another run through the Art Show / Emerging Technologies maelstrom, to see things we'd missed, or that had been down, or to take a closer look, or to get pictures, we retreated to the Animation Theater where Charlotte could watch cartoons and I could nap. One short piece we both saw and liked was:
which consisted of masterful animations based on still scenes by graphic artist M. C. Escher.
I made a quick run through the job fair to see if there were any companies doing 3D in San Diego that our local chapter didn't know about. There were.
Though we were both dog tired, Charlotte and walked through the posters section and looked every one.
I'd poked nose into the Guerilla Studio on Sunday (and on the way in was given a clown nose and a wooden nickel), and seen the nice array of state-of-the-art equipment and eager helpers, and definitely wanted to return with Charlotte and try it together, but by the time we got there Thursday afternoon at 3:00 they'd been closed for an hour already.
( www.siggraph.org/s2007/attendees/studio )
And so we collapsed.
Here's what I missed, but would have liked to have seen:
Riding home on the trolley one last time Charlotte and I had a chance to reflect on our SIGGRAPH time together, and what had made an impression on each of us.
Dad: White Board Graffiti
One example of how "the street tries to find its own uses for things" was the white board graffiti we encountered.
For example, outside the Art Show was a sign-up board for talks by artists; I never saw a schedule on it, but it was always covered with delightful drawings by talented artists attending SIGGRAPH.
On different days there was different art.
The girls added their own art to it.
Daughter: Dreams of a Mardi Gras Mask
Charlotte remarked that after seeing an art installation with a Mardi Gras mask, she remembered that she had the same mask, and then that night dreamed of two girls in Mardi Gras costumes fighting, and tearing up each other's outfits.
The artwork was:
Both: Diorama Table
For our own reasons, Charlotte and I each loved the Diorama Table, listed in the Art Show guide this way:
I watched for a while as Charlotte and her friend B played with this innovative interface, in which the behavior of a projected simulation of dogs, cats and ducks was influenced by the placement of physical objects on the table like cups, apples and string.
Charlotte liked it because it was fun.
We also encountered their poster.
The system is durable enough for kids to play with it freely. Both the projector and the camera are out of reach.
Back in the Art Show I interviewed the artist, who conferred with a colleague in Japanese as needed. She told me that the project was written using Direct X, ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_x ) and was done in broad strokes by a professor and then completed by a student, taking about 3 months.
I told her that what I liked about it was that people were not afraid. Unlike some of the scary-looking VR equipment nearby, unlike the people I train every week in my job who are afraid of their computers, this installation offered you physical objects: a saucer, an apple, which seemed harmless and obvious.
Dad: Local companies in Exhibition and Job Fair
I was pleased at the number of local companies I located which might be able to do future local chapter events.
In the Exhibition:
In the Job Fair:
Daughter: Claytones: A Music System interface
On the posters, Charlotte noticed and commented on a system for letting you control the way you make music by the way you squeeze clay.
Both: PDI/DreamWorks Animation Recruiting Room
Near the Animation Theater we found a room that was really part of the Job Fair, but devoted only to DreamWorks Animation. They had banners advertising five movies:
I reflected on the contrast with other animation companies. Pixar ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixar ) had some robot thing, WALL-E, coming but wasn't pushing it (let alone Toy Story 3 or Up, also in their pipeline), concentrating on flogging its current release Ratatouille. ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratatouille_%28film%29 )
Disney's own Feature Animation label was handing out timelines showing only Bolt in the future (formerly American Dog), scheduled for Nov. 26, 2008 ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolt_(2008_film) )
And Fox was dropping stickers for Horton Hears a Who, coming Mar. 14, 2008 ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horton_Hears_a_Who!_(film) ) ( www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=16502"www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=16502 )
You may recall that PDI/DreamWorks Animation is all that's left of DreamWorks SKG. Spielberg (the S) is back to directing, mostly for Amblin and Universal, Geffen (the G) is stumping for Obama, and only Katzenberg (the K), still sore about being forced out of Disney by jealous Eisner for being too successful with Little Mermaid, Lion Kings, Aladdin, and so on, is left to run the only piece not sold to Paramount. Clearly he's going after Disney with a vengeance, even though Eisner's now gone.
Dad: That Interactive HiDef Cartoon With the Tornado of Cars
This was actually:
I got a chance to try this surreal game-like pastime, which is quite hypnotic.
Daughter: Color Glowing Inflatable Chairs
Charlotte made sure to bring me over to experience this; the inflatable chair I was sitting on changed color to match me.
Both: The Globes Room
I mentioned before we spent a lot of time in this room full of illuminated globes on poles. At first I thought it was just a bunch of cryptic designs. (I guess I'm so used to gibberish in art, from the Dadaists on down, that I wasn't looking for deeper meaning.) Finally I noticed a cardboard sign at the foot of every pole, explaining what the globe visualized. Aha! These were displays of statistics! Bucky Fuller, inventor of the Geoscope, would approve. A few days later I had another "Aha!" Each globe represented a dimension. This room full of globes was visualized high dimensional data, a long-sought goal for uses such as data mining.
Dad: Viral Confections
Artist Caitlin Berrigan had produced Viral Confections, chocolate candies accurately molded into the shapes of deadly viruses.
Her web site claimed she wanted to befriend viruses instead of just killing them without attempting to negotiate.
( http://www.membrana.us/viralconfections.html )
Daughter: Those Cute Robots
In the Animation Theater Charlotte enjoyed the bittersweet:
Both: Escher Animation
As mentioned before, we both really enjoyed the Escher animation in Contrast minimum edition by Tomoko Nagai of Japan.
( www.cadcenter.co.jp/en/info/detail.php?ID=if00157 )
Dad: Computational Cameras
I mentioned that a paper "blew my mind." It was Active Refocusing of Images and Videos by Francesc Moreno-Noguer, et. al.
What these folks have done is combine some existing techniques with some new ones to create a complete software procedure for capturing depth information (what the graphics pros call "Z values") for each pixel. They then use this to simulate changes in focal plane. But it can be used for other things, like stereo pair generation, and 3D modeling. What I realized is that what we think of as cameras will be very different soon, as more clever "hacks" like these are found that make it less necessary for traditional lenses, focus and lighting.
Daughter: Rubbings Interface
Charlotte liked this installation that let you create an image on a screen by hand, and then make a "rubbing" of it on paper. "It goes from manual to digital to manual," she said.
Geehyuk Lee
Information and Communications University
TransPen & MimeoPad: A Playful Interface For Transferring a Graphic Image to Paper by Digital Rubbing
Both: Track Ball Globe With Rotating Ring
Charlotte also made sure to take me back to see this innovative display, which had been down previously. The movability of the globe, for selecting a place, and the ring, for selecting a time, made for a smooth and intuitive interface for displaying changing global data in 4D.
Dad: A 3D Stereo Microscope With No Lenses
This innovative approach used only shadows from two rapidly blinking lights, and was as advertised lensless. I thought it might be possible to use for 3D shadow plays, and other non-microscope applications.
Daughter: Robots On Projected Roads
CoGAME: Manipulation by Projection
Charlotte got to see this Emerging Technologies installation working (it was down when I came by) and was charmed by it; you project routes for robots to follow.
Both: Bean Bag Chairs
Good job with the bean bag chairs at strategic locations. Definitely do that again.
The contrast between the Square and the Street can be seen in San Diego's Old Town and New Town.
According to Wikipedia ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_plan ) San Diego, like all Spanish colonies, was laid out according to a Royal edict:
San Diego's Old Town, now a State Historic Park, was laid out in 1834 in a square according to King Phillip's plan. ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_San_Diego%2C_California ) After the United States took the territory from Mexico, gold was discovered in California, and a trans-continental railroad was begun, entrepreneur Alonzo Horton laid out a New Town for San Diego in 1867, in the form of a street — Fifth Avenue in fact — built a wharf where it reached the bay, and began selling lots. ( http://www.sandramisconi.com/neighborhoods.html#Gaslamp ) This occurred where the Gaslamp Trolley Station is today, across from the Convention Center.
The trolley ride home on Thursday took us from New Town on the route of the old Arizona railroad — that would've made San Diego a bigger port than Los Angeles except that in the desert the tracks kept getting covered by landslides — past the Cesar E. Chavez station again. Once again I resolved to return later and take pictures. (I found myself wondering: why do I get more excited about meeting a student from Brazil than from the Barrio Logan neighborhood of San Diego?)
Some research on the web revealed that this station's "public art" was:
Cesar E. Chavez / 25th & Commercial Trolley Station, Orange Line
Intersection of 25th Street and Commercial Street, Sherman Heights, 92102
It was actually part of a grander plan — so far not completed — to turn the street into a square in that vicinity.
But they did manage to add some storytelling: the cement benches at the trolley stop are covered with small tile murals telling stories of Chavez and his work.
More information:
I also found out that the decorative metal work I'd photographed from a moving trolley was part of the parking garage for the central police station.
This was also where I found the Don Quixote made of mufflers that appears at the beginning of this article.
On the corner was a charming post-modern community center and clock tower.
But the community center was closed.
Nearby was a poster taped to a light pole for a "Festival of the Sun" — "Fiesta Del Sol" — coming to the neighborhood the following week. ( www.FiestaDelSolSanDiego.org )
My curiosity was engaged, and I ended up going.
They took a street and blocked it off, making it more like a square. A number of companies and community organizations had booths. (I bought a tasty tamale and got a free box of gum from Bank of America.) Activities for kids abounded, and they were well-attended.
I realized that in 2003 we'd done a SIGKIDS event with exhibits that were bi-lingual, as well as omni-lingual, but our capacity for providing enriching experiences to kids was quite a bit higher than the number that came. Here perhaps was an organization to tap into for future SIGKIDS outreach efforts.
One other notable thing that I saw on Commercial Street near 25th Street was a building with a neon sign reading "TECHNOMANIA." I thought, "Isn't that what is at the heart of SIGGRAPH? A mania for tech?" A white board had the caption "The Center for Amusing Arts." I found it on the web. According to the San Diego Union:
I'm definitely going to attend one of their upcoming events, and seek synergies with the San Diego SIGGRAPH chapter if possible.
For more information:
Last update 30-Sep-2007.